Samsung Galaxy Nexus
At this moment in time, Samsung has it made. Not only has it just defeated Apple’s attempts to ban its devices from sale in Europe, but with the Galaxy S II it has the market’s best smartphone, and it also has the exclusive contract to develop smartphones for Google.
Its second such Google phone is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which introduces to the world the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.
Android 4, as it shall henceforth be known, borrows features and styling from the tablet-orientated Honeycomb (Android 3) version of the OS, adding new features and a slicker look. We’ll look at it in detail further down this review, but first let’s take a look at the hardware.
The star is the subtly concave AMOLED screen, which measures 4.65in across the diagonal, with an HD resolution of 1,280 x 720.
That’s the highest resolution we’ve seen on any smartphone, and the Nexus manages to squeeze it into a chassis weighing only 135g. It’s thin too, although not quite as skinny as Samsung would have you believe: at its thinnest point it measures 8.9mm from front to back, but that swells to 11.7mm at its thickest point.
Under the hood, a dual-core 1.2GHz processor backed with 1GB of RAM powers the Nexus to some impressive benchmark results.
The SunSpider test completed in 2,005ms – faster than any other smartphone we’ve yet seen. Our new web page load test, in which we time how long the phone loads 28 web pages in sequence, saw the Nexus return a time of 11 seconds, this time a little behind the iPhone 4S’s 9.2 seconds.
In Quadrant, the Nexus scored 1,785 points – quite a way behind the Samsung Galaxy S II’s result of 3,460, but on a par with other Android phones of a similar specification.
Coupled with the new operating system, though, the Nexus feels like a different beast entirely, because the principal benefit Android 4 brings is immediacy.
Clicking links, swiping screens, and navigating your way around the new interface is as sharp an experience as it is on Windows Phone and iOS devices.
Every link, animation and action happens the moment you touch the screen. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the camera app, where snaps can be fired off as fast as you can tap the shutter button. Ice Cream Sandwich makes this the most tactile Android handset yet.
But what other changes does Android 4 bring? The most noticeable is the look. If you’re familiar with Honeycomb, you’ll recognise the neon blue-on-black colour scheme and modernist font.
It’s cleaner and classier than the previous version, and is perfectly suited to the higher-resolution displays beginning to appear on modern smartphones.
In keeping with the tablet-style approach, Android 4 phones will now also sport an onscreen button bar, replacing the discrete physical or capacitive buttons we’ve become accustomed to. This runs along the bottom of the screen and plays host to three controls: back, home and multitasking.
The first two are self-explanatory; the third pops up a vertically scrolling thumbnail list of recent apps, allowing you to quickly switch between apps or kill them by dragging them off screen.
We’re in two minds about this. On the one hand it’s very elegant, and gives Google the flexibility to change the function of the buttons in future. On the other hand, the button bar is, for the most part, a permanent presence: whether you’re browsing the web, using apps or playing a game it’s always there, occupying valuable screen space.
With the button bar in place, the 4.65in screen on the Galaxy Nexus offers just over 4.3in of usable space (see screenshot above), something worth bearing in mind when comparing specifications with older models based on Android 2.3.
The exception to this is Android’s video player app, which slides the bar out of the way during playback. Let’s hope other apps, particularly games, soon follow suit.
Another implication of the button bar is that Android no longer has a dedicated context menu button. On Honeycomb tablets, this issue is resolved by adding an extra, onscreen button next to the three standard ones for applications that have features accessed via the menu button; on Android 4, a similar button appears in the shape of three dots, again to the right of the three main buttons.
The trouble is that there’s another way of providing commonly used controls within Android 4 apps – via the new translucent Action Bar, which can sit either at the top or bottom of the screen. Google’s intention is clearly to provide developers a more elegant way of presenting menus, but the result is a muddlesome mess, with menus and buttons that appear in all sorts of unexpected locations.
We’re also uncertain how the onscreen buttons will jive with the physical buttons of existing phones (such as the Samsung Galaxy S II), when they eventually get their updates. Hopefully, there will be the option to turn it off.
Finally it’s worth mentioning that, at the time of writing, there’s no Flash Player for Ice Cream Sandwich. Adobe has promised an update at some time in December.
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